Tag Archives: low-wage jobs

A few weeks ago I watched Bill Moyers interview conservative economist Arthur Brooks as he mouthed the Republican talking point that the problem with the minimum wage is that “it hurts the people it’s supposed to help” because it eliminates jobs. Moyers politely countered that “some studies” show that minimum wages do not kill jobs. A few days later the PBS News Hour rehearsed an almost identical dialogue between an advocate of living wages and an opponent – a battle of studies about potential job loss. You have undoubtedly heard similar talking-point contests dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

The problem with this debate is that it goes nowhere and educates no one about the relationship between declining real wages for 3/4ths of those employed and the very slow and low economic growth that leaves us with an official unemployment rate above 6%. By itself an increase in the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2016 and then adjusted for inflation each year thereafter, as proposed by President Obama, is insufficient to address these problems. But as the leading edge of a broader program to increase worker spending power in order to get the economy growing more fully, it could be the kind of signature issue that rallies the Democratic base of young people, women, and people of color while also attracting a significantly larger portion of the much-prized white working class (defined as whites without bachelor’s degrees).

For the minimum wage to be a leading edge of such an economic program, however, progressive Democrats have to admit that a large enough and quick enough increase in the federal minimum wage does, in fact, threaten the loss of some low-wage jobs. They have to abandon their “studies show” approach to defending a minimum wage increase, and instead develop a larger narrative about how our gross and still increasing inequality of income and wealth is the principal reason our economy is growing so slowly and, therefore, producing so few jobs.

What’s more, it does not take much political courage to exploit this opportunity because increasing the minimum wage is so damned popular. This is clear from the public reaction to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that concluded, as USA Today headlined, that a “Minimum wage hike could cost 500,000 jobs.” Weeks after this news was widely proclaimed, and typically seen as declaring the Republicans the winner in the “job-killer” talking-points debate, a Pew Center survey found that nearly three-quarters of the public supported a $10.10 minimum wage as proposed by the President.

The strongest argument for a substantial increase in the minimum wage is the one President Obama articulated recently, the simple moral imperative that: “Nobody who works full time should ever have to raise a family in poverty.” The public, including even a slight majority of Republicans, apparently accepts this imperative even if it might cost a substantial number of jobs.

What the CBO report actually said was that somewhere between zero and 1 million jobs might be lost, settling on the 500,000 figure as an educated guess – and thus granting that Democrats could be right in insisting that no jobs might actually be lost. At the same time, the CBO estimated that at least 16.5 million workers would get higher wages directly (because they make less than $10.10 now) while additional millions making a bit more than $10.10 now might also get raises from a “spillover effect” –including, in the CBO’s words, “a few higher-wage workers [who] would owe their jobs and increased earnings to the heightened demand for goods and services that would result from the minimum-wage increase.” Thus, the CBO thinks there is a trade-off: of the 17 million workers directly affected, 97% would definitely benefit while 3% might lose their jobs.

Equally important, the CBO compared President Obama’s earlier $9-an-hour proposal with the current $10.10 one, and found that many fewer people would benefit from it (7.6 million) but fewer jobs would be put at risk (only 100,000). Thus, by reducing the amount of increase, the trade-off is also reduced: 98.7% would definitely benefit and only 1.3% might lose their jobs, but less than half the number of workers would be affected.

This is the single most important thing about the federal minimum wage: the higher the wage floor, the more people who benefit but the more jobs that are put at risk. For most public policies (or private ones for that matter) something that benefits 97% but harms 3% would be considered an excellent risk-reward ratio. But the loss of a job (even a low-wage one) in our society is such a punishing harm that it makes most people hesitate to “throw anybody under the bus.” Though majority public opinion supports the $10.10 minimum wage anyway, the threat of job loss undoubtedly reduces their ardor and thus the saliency of the issue in elections. The Pew survey cited above, for example, found a large gap between support for the increase and the degree to which that support would affect people’s votes.

If, as Democrats currently do, you want to insist that increases in the minimum wage won’t cost any jobs, you have to keep the increase relatively low. On the other hand, if you grant that jobs may be lost and you are not indifferent to that, then the logical response would be to search for a way to replace the 500,000 jobs that might be put at risk.

Such a way is easily found in another highly popular Democrat proposal: government investment in infrastructure — roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, public transportation, weatherization and other energy efficiency, and green technology. All these are included in President Obama’s current budget proposal before Congress, though at very small levels. The President proposes an increase of just $75 billion a year for the next four years, while the House Congressional Progressive Caucus (all Democrats) wants $130 billion a year over ten years, and the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that we need $225 billion a year over the next 16 years. Using Council of Economic Advisers’ estimates, Obama’s minimalist plan would create 975,000 jobs, while a fully developed program that would meet our infrastructure needs would provide 2.8 million mostly decently paid construction jobs.

I may be comparing apples and oranges among these various plans, but you get my point. The President’s minimalist plan would create more than enough well-paying jobs to replace any low-wage jobs that might be lost due to increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. If we actually invested amounts like the American Society of Civil Engineers thinks we need, we should be able to offset any jobs lost to an even higher minimum wage – say $15 an hour. Over time, low-wage jobs would be replaced with higher wage ones, greatly increasing worker spending power, reducing inequality, increasing economic growth, and creating even more jobs.

Such an ambitious infrastructure program would have to be paid for, and the President has proposed to pay for his minimal program through a variety of small tax increases based on eliminating loopholes for corporations and individuals. But here our great inequality of wealth and income becomes a distinct advantage, as one of our most plentiful national resources is rich people with much more money than they need. As I have pointed out before, there are any number of ways to increase taxes on the top 1% or 2% without significantly reducing their living standards and life prospects. $220 billion is chump change for a group that each year earns $2 trillion more than they used to when labor unions forced productivity sharing on profitable companies.

You may say this is all pie in the sky, but I offer it as a winning political program for Democrats – one that simply ramps up and connects several existing Dem proposals. A minimum wage that could really make a difference in people’s lives would disproportionately benefit the Democratic base of young people, women, and people of color – giving them a reason to vote. An infrastructure program at a scale we actually need in the 21st century would disproportionately benefit white working-class men, a key part of the Republican base, while also providing opportunities for renewed affirmative action hiring requirements in the building trades. A large tax increase on our oligarchs would satisfy many people’s sense of justice while providing the money to get the economy growing again at a pace that can provide jobs and wages that make everybody’s lives better.

This is a program that could give working-class people of all colors and genders a reason to vote and a reason to vote for Democrats. Republicans are currently blocking small increases in the minimum wage, minimalist investments in infrastructure, and tax increases on the rich of any kind. Why not propose something big enough to make a difference – replacing low-wage jobs with well-paying ones – and then win elections that might allow you to actually do it?

That’s the headline I propose for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to attract public attention to its most recent projection of job growth in the next decade. Though a tendentious conclusion from the BLS study, such a headline could draw the kind of bipartisan outrage that might lead to a more honest and accurate discussion of the relation between education, jobs, and income in these United States.

The BLS does its study of U.S. occupations every two years, showing the number of jobs in each occupation, its educational requirements, and how much it pays. Though the specifics change, every two years the study shows that a large majority of jobs now and in the future require no education beyond high school. And every two years the carefully compiled BLS data is ignored, leaving the field clear for everybody from the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal to President Obama to proclaim that “education is the answer” to economic inequality, poverty, and low wages.

“Graduating college is highly overrated” is about as half-true, and therefore false, as “education is the answer.” But each claim has some evidence to support it.

According to the BLS, in 2012 only 22% of all jobs required a bachelor’s degree or more, and of the more than 50 million job openings the BLS projects by 2022, only 22% will require a bachelor’s or more. (In fact, if all you have is a bachelor’s degree, there are only 17% of jobs now and 17% of job openings projected by 2022 that require that degree and no more.) Problem is that about 32% of the population over the age of 25 has a bachelor’s, and among young people ages 25 to 34, it is a bit higher at 34%. In other words, there are only two jobs for every three persons who have a bachelor’s degree, and the number of people getting bachelor’s degrees is growing faster than the number of jobs that require that degree – or anything close to it.

Indeed, 26% of jobs in 2012 did not even require a high school diploma, and another 40% required only a high school diploma. And the BLS projects that it will get worse by 2022, when nearly a third of all job openings will require “less than high school.”

There is a more ambiguous category of jobs that require some “postsecondary education,” whether an associate’s degree or some kind of specialized training certificate or simply “some college.” But they are required for only about 11% of jobs now, and are projected to provide about 12% of job openings going forward.

The table below summarizes how overeducated our population is for the jobs we actually have.

We have an oversupply of jobs that require high school or less (66%) compared to the 42% of people whose education fits those jobs. And conversely, we have an oversupply of people with some postsecondary education (58%) for the 33% of jobs that require something like that level of education.

Just looking at what jobs are now and will be available in the U.S. economy, graduating college seems highly overrated – and it might even be that “going to college is for suckers.” If all you need for most jobs is a high school education, why bother with college? That’s simple: wages.

A recent Pew Research Center study, The Rising Cost of NOT Going to College, looks at how income correlates with earnings. As previous studies have found, high school graduates make $7,000 more a year than those who do not graduate. Those with “some college” make an additional $2,000, and those who get bachelor’s degrees make $13,000 more on top of that. The gradient could not be clearer: those with bachelor’s degrees have average incomes twice that of those without high school diplomas ($45,000 vs. $23,000). What’s more, unemployment rates, poverty rates, and other things follow a similar gradient: the more education, the lower the unemployment rate, the lower the poverty rate, and the more likely you are to have full-time employment and employer-paid benefits. Conversely, though there are and will be plenty of jobs for people who do not graduate from high school and for those whose education ends with a high school diploma, these jobs generally pay miserable wages – almost uniformly less than $30,000 a year, and most much less.

So, “education is the answer” has some evidence to support it, too. But both statements are half-truths – not much education is required for most American jobs (now and in the future) and more education leads to higher pay and steadier employment. It is only when you put the two half-truths together that you can see the whole picture.

If you are an individual 18-year-old, your only chance for a decent income is to go to college or to get some other form of postsecondary education. Statistically, it will give you a 2 to 1 shot at a decent standard of living vs. a thousand to one for high school graduates and a million to one for those who never graduate from high school. But if all 18-year-olds – or even most of them – play these odds by going to college, it will do nothing to remedy economic inequality, low wages, and poverty. In fact, it would probably make all these things worse.

The increasing imbalance of supply and demand — more college graduates than jobs that require them — puts downward pressure on the wages of jobs that require higher education and ensures that more college graduates will be forced to take jobs that do not require college. Pew found that more than one-third of the recent college graduates it surveyed were currently working in jobs that do not require any college. Likewise, as more college graduates take jobs that require only high school, more high school graduates are forced to take jobs that do not require a high school diploma, and those who did not graduate from high school have great difficulty finding and keeping any job. It’s a perfect formula for cheapening all labor. More and more education is required to attain a decent standard of living, but as more and more people gain higher levels of education, they further flood those higher-paying job markets, leading to lower average wages and living standards for everybody.

The Pew study emphasizes the growing gap between the incomes of college graduates and non-graduates, but it also shows that the real wages of recent college graduates have basically stagnated since 1986. The growing premium paid to people with bachelor’s degrees is almost entirely the result of 13% and 18% declines in real wages for high school graduates and those with “some college.”

More formal education may be an answer for individuals – and I do all I can to convince my grandsons of that. But it is not and cannot be any part of the solution to economic inequality, poverty, and low wages. The remedy for all three is the same: higher wages, starting at the low end and reaching up to frontline supervisors. To get higher wages, workers with and without college degrees are going to need the kind of organized, disciplined collective action that we are beginning to see the first glimmers of among fast-food, Walmart, warehouse, and many other workers.

Those of us in higher education can help by developing a curriculum that will be relevant to those one out of three of our graduates who will not be getting jobs that require college educations. They need courses in the history of American social movements and courses that teach organizing tactics and strategies for workplace, community, and political organizing, complete with “service learning” internships. Those are the skills that are needed to raise wages and reduce poverty for the vast majority of American workers. If we taught those skills, then graduating college might be a bit less overrated than it is today.

I’m always interested in popular images of working-class life, but like most people, I barely see TV commercials anymore, so it took me a while to notice a recent trio of ads that use work as a marketing theme. Advertisers use images to sell things, of course, and that’s part of what makes these ads so problematic – and so interesting.

The first ad, promoting Cadillac’s electric car, features actor Neal McDonough talking about how people in other countries think Americans are crazy for working so hard. He begins outside an upscale home, standing hear a very nice pool, asking “Why do we work so hard? For what? For this? For stuff?” People in other countries “stop by the café” as they “stroll home. They take August off.” “We,” on the other hand – presumably not only white wealthy folks like the narrator but most of us – are “crazy, driven, hard-workin’ believers.” That’s what made it possible for us to go to the moon, and that’s why “we’re the only ones going back there.” Americans are better, the ad suggests, because of the American dream: “It’s pretty simple: you work hard, you create your own luck, and you’ve gotta believe anything is possible.”

While Cadillac rehearses the old myth that anyone can succeed, economists are reporting that few Americans actually live that Horatio Alger storyline. Upward mobility hasn’t declined, a recent paper showed; it’s been low for decades. But as the ad makes clear, the myth of the self-made man still has resonance, both for those who might think the ad describes them but even more, I fear, for those who desperately want to believe that “anything is possible.” If anyone can create their own luck, then the only reason anyone might struggle is that they didn’t try hard enough. To promote this narrative while economic inequality is growing is cynical, arrogant, and mean-spirited.

The Cadillac ad is easy to criticize, since its message is so clearly problematic. Two other ads offer more positive images of work and workers, which make them at once appealing and appalling. Chrysler’s latest “Made in Detroit” Super Bowl ad features yet another white male pop culture icon: Bob Dylan. In this year’s ad, Dylan touts American creativity and pride, and he encourages us to let Germany make beer, Switzerland make watches, and Asia make cell phones. “We will build your car,” he says, leaning down over a barroom pool table. The ad features images of cowboys, cheerleaders, James Dean, Rosie the Riveter, old-style diners, and the American highway system, as well as images of auto plants and of Detroit today. Here, the call to creativity isn’t illustrated by technical innovators but by someone getting a tattoo, by graffiti on a stone bridge, and by Dylan, turning a guitar in his hand, a move that is echoed in a clip from an old industrial film, showing a turning piece of machinery. Like Cadillac, Chrysler is appealing to American arrogance, but with a more working-class approach.

The last ad appeals even more directly to working-class viewers, in part by focusing on deindustrialization and manufacturing jobs. It opens with images of an abandoned factory, as TV host Mike Rowe intones in a voice over, “At one time, I made things, and I took pride in the things I made.” Then, “the gears stopped turning.” But, the voice continues, “I’m still here” (ironically, this echoes a song by Si Kahn, “We’re Still Here,” written for a 1983 documentary about Youngstown steelworkers’ efforts to buy and run the mills that corporations had recently shut down – a connection the ad’s authors almost certainly didn’t know about). As the images shift to someone sweeping an empty factory floor and then to laughing groups of workers, the narrator predicts that “we will rise again, and we will build things, and build families, and build dreams. It’s time to get back to what America does best. Because work is a beautiful thing.” It’s an appealing message, one that reflects some core values of working-class studies. We believe in the power of work, we know what was lost in deindustrialization, and we want to see a return of good jobs that they offer a decent paycheck and a chance to feel proud of one’s work.

Then we see the closing title, showing that the ad is for Wal-Mart, promising to invest in new manufacturing jobs in the U.S. This is just one of several ads Wal-Mart has put out that at least indirectly respond to widespread critiques of its poor treatment of workers. In others, Wal-Mart workers talk about getting promoted, health insurance, and support for education, leaving out other “benefits,” like advice on signing up for public assistance. Critics of the Wal-Mart business model and advocates for low-wage workers have viewed these ads with skepticism, but this latest one elicited an even stronger response, probably because Rowe is known for talking about jobs that are dirty, unusual, and traditionally working-class. He has also formed a foundation to encourage people to pursue skilled trades rather than higher education. Without talking about class directly, Rowe’s website suggests that working-class jobs can be good jobs, and that’s an important message, especially at a time when so many working-class jobs are so bad. You can see how some might have expected Rowe to refuse to speak for the company most strongly identified with bad working-class jobs.

In response to the ad, Jobs with Justice (JwJ), a non-profit that aims to make the bad working-class jobs a little better, targeted Rowe in a letter-writing campaign. Thousands of people have written to encourage him to meet with Wal-Mart workers and challenging him to rescind what they see as his endorsement of the company. Rowe has posted a series of responses on his facebook page, accusing JwJ of misunderstanding his role – he insists he’s not a spokesman for Wal-Mart – and criticizing JwJ’s tactics. If you care so much about workers, he asks at one point, why disrupt my Foundation’s efforts to help young working-class people find good jobs – jobs that are, he points out, significantly better than the ones held by the workers JwJ advocates for? Rowe also challenges JwJ: “But even if Wal-Mart falls short, don’t discount the power of a positive message in the mainstream media. We need more good messages around American manufacturing and hard work. . . . Why not encourage more messages around a topic that can actually help your mission and the people you represent?”

Good question. The message that we need more manufacturing jobs is, indeed, a good one – even though today’s manufacturing jobs don’t offer anything like the pay and benefits of the ones people lost when those factories originally shut down. And yes, we do need more messages that make clear how good jobs improve people’s lives. We also want those images to be used in ways that really do promote workers’ interests. The problem with the Wal-Mart ad isn’t the way it represents work and workers. It’s that it uses those images to promote a company that we know contributes to the problems workers face.

Advertising works in part by creating illusions and by manipulating viewers, so we shouldn’t be surprised that advertisers are responding to economic inequality by capitalizing on the longing many Americans feel for economic hope. They know we’re nostalgic for a time when American made things and when hard work seemed to ensure a better life. They know that we want to believe what the guy in the Cadillac promises – “anything is possible” if only we work hard enough. And they know what we would like to forget: that ads like this work.

When the media became aware of the protest centered at Wall Street during the fall of 2011, a predictable line of questioning immediately appeared – whatever in the world are they protesting? “The cause . . . was virtually impossible to decipher,” intoned the New York Times, joining the bulk of the mainstream coverage of the protest in its early weeks, which together professed confusion at the sight of the rag-tag group of occupiers.

Of course, to crib Liza Featherstone, covering the protests for another NY daily, the opposite was closer to the truth: everyone who came near Zuccotti Park knew exactly why the protesters were there. Given the scale of the economic crisis, Main Street’s bailout of Wall Street, and ongoing oligarchy, the “only surprise [was that it took] so long for the citizenry to take to these particular streets.” The graphic polarization of their chant, “We Are the 99%” made it all the more clear: it’s the (unequal) economy, stupid.

In the years since the destruction of the occupations, this critique of inequality – one, broad part of what Occupy was all about – has only broadened and deepened in the US. Occupy should claim credit for getting it on the map, while political iterations old and new have been keeping it there. Today, the fight against inequality is taking greater institutional shape, and seemingly exerting more leverage, in places inspired by Occupy but moving beyond its initial tactics.

Studying Occupy Wall Street in New York from its inception and through 2012, my colleagues and I traced the “enduring impact” of OWS through various measures, including the ongoing movement participation of core participants and the proliferation of “Occupy after Occupy” efforts – what journalist Nathan Schneider described as a “productively subdivided movement of movements.”

Joining most observers, we noted that Occupy’s impact was most easily traced in the extent to which it had shifted the discourse in the United States. “Income inequality” was suddenly in the headlines. We included a graph that showed how frequently the phrase was invoked by the media pre-, during, and post-Occupy. We found that news mentions of “income inequality” rose dramatically with the outset of Occupy, and in the aftermath remained substantially higher through the end of 2012 (up about a third from pre-Occupy levels).

I ran the numbers again this week, and I have to admit I was surprised by the results.

LexisNexis Academic Database, all news (English), United States

As we’d seen before, in the year after Occupy’s peak, the numbers stayed higher – 30-50% of the pre-Occupy discussion. But beginning in the fall of 2013, the numbers reached Occupy levels again, and this time rising to over 2000 mentions of the phrase “income inequality” in December 2013 – over 50% more than Occupy’s peak.

Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see this rise. The occupations have gone away, but neither the crisis nor the resistance has disappeared. Low-wage and precarious workers are at the forefront of the fights today, and they are keeping inequality in the spotlight. This past fall and winter we’ve seen fast food strikes and the “Fight for $15”; other minimum wage fights around the country; Walmart workers demanding $25,000; university adjuncts organizing and striking. Workers, unionists and Occupy veterans, through both traditional labor and “alt-labor” organizations are elevating the fights around income inequality and pushing for concrete change. Tailing these developments, figures from President Obama and the Gap are now simultaneously pushing for (highly inadequate) wage increases.

Media attention to inequality reflects recent electoral shifts as well. Mayors who ran left were decisively elected in New York, Seattle, and Boston. (Occupations existed all over the country, but it would be interesting to probe the relationship between those Occupations and new electoral outcomes. Certainly, these three cities were home to sustained and popular occupations in fall 2011.) Labor’s candidates and initiatives did well overall, in the 2013 local election cycle; and in Seattle, Occupy activist and socialist Kshama Sawant was elected to the City Council. While many of the core Occupy activists eschewed electoral politics, we nevertheless see the outlines of their critique emerge in race after race.

As important as Occupy’s inspiration has been as the carrot encouraging these new movements and electoral shifts, the ongoing crisis that working people are experiencing and the desperate straits that unions and other progressives find themselves in provide the stick. . Labor, in particular, has been working hard to shift course for many years. Occupy’s eruption was a major shot in the arm, but many of the campaigns we see today have their roots pre-Occupy.

However, the energy and audacity in today’s movements are fueled in part by the experience of Occupy (and the organizers who started the occupations and emerged from them). Direct action and prefigurative practices inform many of the efforts that contribute to today’s groundswell, such as the strikes and walkouts. But unions are also exploring worker cooperatives, community groups and activists are forestalling foreclosures through occupations, and activists are tying collective student debt refusal to the demand for free higher education.

The Occupy activists we spoke with two years ago continuously echoed each other, saying that the movement needs to “take the long view” and remember that change doesn’t happen overnight. I haven’t spoken with enough of those activists today to know their assessment of the fights they see and are participating in today. They are not out there, all day, all week, occupying Wall Street – and it wasn’t enough when they were. The scale of necessary social transformation remains daunting, and questions of both strategy and power loom large. But all day, and all week, more people are talking about inequality and directly fighting against it. And workplace by workplace, franchise by franchise, ordinance by ordinance, council member by council member, co-op by co-op, the struggle continues.

I got wet last Thursday, very wet. I was standing on a picket line at my university outside the central administration protesting yet another below inflation wage offer. A one per cent pay raise will mean that my colleagues and I have lost between 10 and 15 per cent of the value of our salary through inflation since the financial crisis hit in 2008. Meanwhile the top pay in the university sector has been rising steadily. My own Vice Chancellor has been awarded a 1.8% raise this year, but that borders on the hair-shirt compared to her peers where double digit increments are not uncommon.

While comparative pay rates in higher education are obviously important to those of us who work in the sector, the question of pay both at the top and bottom of society more generally has come to the fore in the UK over the last few months. What matters about this debate is how it is rolled up in a whole series of other factors central to the contemporary working-class experience – the link between work, welfare, wealth, and poverty.

In their recent report, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) highlighted the fact that for the first time on record the majority of those in poverty were in working families, not registered as unemployed or retirees. This trend began to increase in 2003, and the increase in poverty within these working families halted the more general progressive trends to reduce poverty over all. As a result there are more people in poverty in working families than in workless and retired families combined, and that undermines government ministers’ claims that work itself is some kind of silver bullet cure-all for the poor. The problem isn’t simply a lack of work; it’s also about low pay. In 2012, there were around 4.6 million low-paid jobs in the UK, and 39 per cent of these workers were under 30. This means roughly one in six workers in the UK economy lives in poverty.

Low wages contribute to poverty, but so does the structure of contemporary employment, and the JRF report highlights the growth of insecure work and underemployment. In 2012, an estimated 250,000 people were employed on zero-hours contracts (where workers are not guaranteed a fixed number of hours). This figure has varied over the years, with a low of 110,000 people on such contracts in 2004. Drill down into these figures and we find that the average hours worked has declined from 28 hours per week in 2000 to 21 hours in 2012. Of course, these are averages, with the actual hours worked oscillating one week to another. In addition, 620,000 people who desired permanent contracts are on temporary ones. They want and need permanent status rather than ‘choosing’ the flexibly of temporary work as a convenient economic lifestyle. These features of the labour market — low pay, in-work poverty, zero-hours, and temporary contracts — are all working-class issues. All corrode the elements of settled living that gave some semblance of stability to working-class communities in the past.

Some social scientists in the UK have interpreted these features as evidence of what Guy Standing has labelled the ‘precariat’ (see John’s Russo’s blog about the book here). More recently, UK sociologists Mike Savage and Fiona Devine have developed a widened class schema with a group at the bottom that they also call the ‘precariat.’ In both instances, what unites this new group of disparate people is their common experience of various forms of labor market instability. Their existence has a powerful disciplinary role on others in more secure work. Knowledge that firms might outsource roles to contractors, or off-shore it altogether, leads individual workers and their collective representatives to temper demands for higher wages and better conditions of service.

These findings start to puncture some big holes in the popular political and press accounts of the causes and consequences of the recession. Worklessness (people without work regardless of whether or not they are officially unemployed and drawing benefits) is not the great cause of poverty politicians would have us believe, and intergenerational worklessness – where two or more generations of family members are out of work – is a more marginal issue still. When asked about welfare, most survey respondents think that benefit fraud is a massive problem accounting for large chunks of the welfare bill. In fact, it represents less than 1% of the total. Surveys also show that most people believe that unemployment benefit makes up the largest share of the benefits budget, when in fact pensions are the greatest cost. The real problem is with the real level of wages and how employment is structured.

Unfortunately, the political and press rhetoric around welfare in the UK is if anything ramping up, with a pernicious demonization of those on benefits. The UK based Channel 4, for example, has come in for a great deal of criticism for its TV documentary Benefits Street, which is based on what the producers describe as one of the most welfare dependant addresses in the UK. They have been attacked by residents of the street, including one couple who had been extensively filmed and who alleged that their in-work status meant they didn’t fit the dependence narrative of the series and were subsequently left out of the program. Listening to a recent BBC radio piece reflecting on Benefits Street, I was struck by the different ways of talking about the people there. While politicians and journalists used the phrases ‘welfare cheats’ and ‘benefit dependent,’ the residents themselves used the term ‘poverty’ to describe conditions in their area.

This rhetorical distinction perhaps holds the key for a more informed and progressive debate about the lives of working people, one where we shift the vernacular from ‘welfare queens’ and ‘benefits cheats’ on to the terrain of poverty. Reading Jack Metzgar’spiece a couple of weeks ago about SNAP recipients in the US, I am struck by the similarity in debates about the ‘deserving’ and especially the ‘undeserving’ poor. On both sides of the Atlantic, politicians’ reluctance to talk about poverty, its causes and amelioration, creates a vacuum that more reactionary commentators are happy to fill. As the lead character in the HBO show The Newsroom laments, in the past, “We waged wars on poverty, not poor people.” Fifty years after Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty, we need to shift the vernacular more than ever. There’s an idea worth getting wet for!

The biggest obstacle to organizing adjunct (part-time and full-time non-tenure-track) professors, who now comprise 75% of the faculty in higher education, with part-timers working for $2700 per course on average — is fear. Most people assume that adjuncts fear retribution for boat-rocking of any kind. That worry is not unfounded, since examples of such retaliation abound.

However, many adjuncts feel paralyzed by a deeper, unspoken fear, one that is primarily internal and fraught with complexities that Working-Class Studies can help illuminate and overcome. This fear stems from the tension, well-documented and long-discussed, between adjuncts’ nominal professional status and the actual workplace conditions that place us in the category of the working class.

The intense debate surrounding Duquesne adjunct French professor Margaret Mary Vojtko’s life and death has placed this tension in an unusually prominent light. For many adjuncts, as for members of other professions, talk of organizing instills fear not so much of retaliation but of being associated with the “kind of person” who joins a union. With titles and work that give the public perception of professional status but without the corresponding income, hanging on to that status becomes critical to maintaining one’s identity.

Professor Vojtko does not appear to have been afflicted with this kind of fear. Contrary to what the Duquesne administration would have the public believe, she sought out and strongly supported the new union. Her colleagues and her family, who knew her best, believe that she would have approved of the attention finally being directed at the injustices she and so many other contingent faculty have experienced for decades. Yet a disturbingly high number of the responses to Vojtko’s story reveal that many adjuncts have experienced — or are expected by others to experience — deep shame. As a result, many adjuncts personalize and privatize the structural and systemic nature of the inequities in higher education. Naive belief in an illusory meritocracy often obstructs the ability to understand that the academic employment system is not immutable. “I had the privilege of an education and the pleasure of work I enjoy,” goes this script, “so I should have ‘known better,’ and now deserve the conditions in which I live.” Variations on this theme include internal and external rebukes for not accepting the economic status quo as supposedly natural rather than constructed.

How can we combat the paralyzing effects of the internally- and externally-imposed fears in order to mobilize adjuncts into organizing and action?

One answer, evidenced by the successful forays of non-academic unions of Votjko’s Steelworkers and SEIU into adjunct organizing, has been to “flip the classroom,” to appropriate the language of some of the corporate reform most in vogue. In this approach, faculty indignation that adjuncts are treated as “nothing more” than, for example, fast-food workers (statements that reinforce the class divide) is transformed from denunciation into inspiration — and aspiration. We begin to see other workers’ material and psychological gains as achievable goals. We begin to see them as colleagues who are confronting the structural reality we have fooled ourselves into denying. We allow ourselves to be educated by, as well as to educate, the janitors and fast-food workers of America, who are often our students and sometimes our relatives. This can only be done, like most other organizing, with one-on-one discussions that build trust and relationships as they educate.

For me, the lessons have been quite personal. Being the granddaughter of an immigrant steelworker from Braddock, PA, was not something to which I gave much thought until I became an adjunct. Up until then, my experiences as an Asian American woman figured more prominently in my life. My father had moved successfully from the working class to a solid middle class professional life, never forgetting or turning his back on his roots. My grandfather, who never finished high school, and my father, who was the first in his immediate family to get a college degree and who worked his way through college without incurring any student loan debt, saw my desire to become a college professor as a logical outgrowth of the family journey. It validated their faith that higher education was the key element in such a journey.

My grandfather did not live to see me go on to a PhD program. Nor did he see me get derailed from finishing it and end up in contingent academic employment needing financial assistance from my family because my full-time “part-time” teaching could hardly support a 5-person family with a new baby, a child on the autism spectrum, and a spouse who had lost his own teaching job in the worst economy in the US in decades. I’m glad that my grandfather didn’t have to witness what has shocked my father: that higher education failed to live up to their experience and expectations.

But I am also sad that my grandfather did not live to see me become an activist and organizer for contingent faculty and for the integrity of higher education. I wish I could ask him about his union organizing in the 1930s, or why he became disillusioned with his union in the 1960s and 70s, and I wonder what he would think about the state of the American labor movement today. I am glad that I can talk to my father about his professional association and his uncomplicated recognition and appreciation of its function as a labor organization. And I am very glad, now that I teach mostly working-class and immigrant students at a community college, that I can speak to my dad about what it was like being a working class, “ethnic” student at a college where he was decidedly in the minority. I’m glad that being an adjunct has made me better able to understand the social, political, and economic stresses of my students.

As I work to organize adjunct faculty in Ohio and nationally, my own biggest fear is that any successes we have will erase our collective memory of our adjunct experience and desensitize us to the reality of the least advantaged of our students. If our efforts re-gild instead of reclaim the ivory tower, then we will have failed our students and ourselves.

Our success should instead be measured by the degree to which our movement breaks down the academic caste system and promotes respect for those of our students and colleagues who come from working-class backgrounds. It will be successful when organizing efforts, like adjuncts themselves, are no longer on the margins of political activity — or civic education.

Last month a few hundred retail and fast-food workers, from places like Sears, Dunkin’ Donuts, and McDonald’s, walked off their jobs for a rally in downtown Chicago. Carrying signs saying “Fight for 15” (or “Lucha Por 15”) and “We Are Worth More,” these workers make $9 or $10 an hour, at best, and they figure they’re worth at least $15.

A one-shift walk-out and protest by a few hundred out of the thousands of such workers in the Chicago Loop and along Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile cannot have the economic impact of a traditional strike – one that shuts down an entire workplace or industry for an extended period of time and, therefore, can bend an employer’s will. And these workers’ chances of getting $15 an hour any time soon are worse than slim. This “job action,” bolstered by community supporters organized by Action Now and with help from Service Employees International Union organizers, is more in the nature of a public protest than a “real strike.” You could even call it “a public relations stunt,” but you’d be wrong to dismiss it as inconsequential.

“Public relations,” ironically, has a bad image. But think of it as workers witnessing their own plight, calling for others in similar situations to join them and appealing to those of us with decent incomes to support them. Witnessing, with its religious overtones, is not intended as an immediately practical action. It’s first about individuals summoning the courage to put themselves forward to make a public claim that they are one of thousands (millions nationally) who are being treated unjustly. In this case, it means taking the risk that they may be fired or otherwise disciplined for leaving work and going into the streets to proclaim “We are worth more.”

Witnessing is meant to make us think about justice as the witnesses simultaneously inspire and shame us with the courage of their individual actions. I was at one of the first draft-card burnings that protested the Vietnam War in 1965, and I remember saying something like, “I’d do that if I thought it would do any good,” while knowing in my heart of hearts that I didn’t have the guts to take that kind of risk then. But it inspired and shamed me – and thousands and then hundreds of thousands of others — to do many other things to fight against that war as we inspired and bolstered (and exerted peer pressure on) each other.

For the broader public, these initial job actions – in New York and Chicago among retail and fast-food workers; in California and Illinois among workers at Walmart warehouses; and all over the place among Walmart retail workers – are “public relations” that raise awareness and pluck consciences. But for workers who watched workmates walk off the job to witness for them, there may be some of that inspiration and/or shame that is a particularly powerful call to action. That’s what organizers are counting on, in the hope that the numbers of such workers will grow helter-skelter across the retail industry, eventually initiating a contagion of worker direct action that can put these workers in a position to negotiate for “labor peace,” with or without the blessing of the National Labor Relations Board.

There’s another determined witness who couldn’t be more unlike these striking workers. He’s a retired law professor from the University of Texas, Charles Morris, who is a leading expert on the legislative and early administrative history of the National Labor Relations Act and the Board that enforces it. In a 2005 book, The Blue Eagle at Work, Morris makes the legal case that the Act defined a labor union as any group of two or more workers who act together (“in concert”) to seek redress of grievances from their employer. According to Morris, the “concerted activity protection” articulated in the Act means that employers cannot legally fire workers for forming a non-majority or “members-only” union (as few as two workers acting together), and what’s more, an employer is legally bound to “bargain in good faith” with that union.

Through meticulous legal research, Morris has shown that these worker rights were in the Act from the beginning but have been forgotten by the subsequent customary practice of defining a union as only that group of workers who have formally voted to be represented by a petitioning union. What’s more, other legal scholars have now signed on to Morris’s legal interpretation and are ready to bolster it before an NLRB that is willing to hear their case. There would be such an NLRB, what Morris calls “a friendly Board,” if Republican Senators would allow a vote on President Obama’s nominees for the Board.

A favorable NLRB ruling would be important for a variety of legally technical reasons that workers and organizers could use to their tactical and strategic advantage – none of which includes the expectation that employers will voluntarily obey the law just because it is the law. But equally important is that Morris’s reading of the Act’s history restores the original meaning of a labor union that is based on workers’ decisions to act together “in concert” with one another. That is, a labor union is not just an institution with a bureaucracy and a marble palace in Washington, D.C., though it may be that as well. It is any group of workers in any workplace, no matter how big or small, who decide to and then do act in concert to advance their own interests in their workplace.

In March Chicago Working-Class Studies helped organize a public forum that brought Charles Morris together with workers and organizers from Fight for 15, the Walmart retail and warehouse strikers, and two other groups who are already acting as unions under this definition. Though there were some disagreements between the elderly legal scholar and the mostly young workers and organizers — one emphasizing the importance of politics and administrative case law in the long run, the others focused on the potential of direct action in the here and now – they agreed that if and when the two come together, the possibilities for a worker-led upsurge of union organizing are great.

Nonetheless, through their actions these workers have already changed what a labor union is and is thought to be. It is now, and really always has been — even a century before the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935, even when it was an illegal “conspiracy” — simply a group of two or more workers acting in concert with one another. To be really effective there will need, of course, to be many, many more than the hundreds and thousands who have begun this process. But it starts with a few brave witnesses who take a risk and ask others to join them. The peer pressure is now on the rest of us.

Working-Class Perspectives offers weekly commentaries on current issues related to working-class people and communities. Contributors discuss a variety of issues, from what class means to how it intersects with race and gender to how class is shaping American politics. We welcome relevant comments of 500 words or less.

For questions or comments about this blog, e-mail Sherry Linkon. For assistance with news stories about working-class politics and culture, call or e-mail John Russo, 330-207-8085.